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DevilsAdvocate wrote:M. Russell Ballard wrote:
Brethren, if you will set aside your cell phone and actually look around a little, you may even find your future companion at the institute…Which leads me to another bit of counsel that I’m sure you knew was coming:
You single adults need to date and marry. Please stop delaying!I know some of you fear family formation. However, if you marry the right person at the right time and in the right place, you need not fear. In fact, many problems you encounter will be avoided if you are “anxiously engaged” in righteous dating, courting, and marriage.
That’s easy for them to say when they’re not the ones that will have to live with the long-term consequences of decisions like this. These guys need to recognize that it’s not the 1950s anymore and their fairy-tale notions about marriage supposedly being a sure-fire step toward living happily ever after simply do not reflect current reality given the prevalence of divorce and widespread dissatisfaction in many marriages nowadays. Do young single adults really fear starting a family or do they mostly fear not being able to support a family very well until they have a decent job, settling for the first “worthy” Church member they can find that is willing to marry them when they think they could do better, etc.? Seriously, why the rush? I suspect this highly questionable advice is mostly because Church leaders fear that the longer young adults remain single the higher the chances are that they will fall away from the Church so that’s why would rather see them jump into marriage head first ASAP hoping they will tough it out long enough to stick in the Church regardless of how happy they really are in the end or not.
I like advice of being anxiously engaged and NOT FEARING what will come. What will come, will be good if you are following your heart on planning out life and what you want.Get married young even if you still have school and careers and are poor….that’s great…not delaying the blessings of that will work great for some.
Delaying marriage to get an education and become financially on good ground and grow emotionally to be prepared for marriage and life after…that will work for some people too.
Or…
– Date and have fun, delay marriage until you’ve found the right situation
– Get married and delay having children until you’re ready
– Get married and start having kids, delaying education and careers and work hard at building a life together
All those options are good when a person is working towards becoming someone ready for the future.
The advice I have for my kids is…don’t just put off responsibility to play video games and work minimum wage jobs. Prepare yourself for what is next. But don’t let anyone else tell you what pace that needs to be at…you are unique. Go at YOUR pace to reach YOUR goals…because it is YOUR life. Don’t live in fear of what is next, and don’t live with guilt you’re not like others.In other words…have a “My Plan” and follow it. Just don’t worry if it is different than others’ plans.
Too many words of advice from church leaders only caters to one group…the get married young group. Why? I don’t get it. I think it should be catered to the “Don’t be lazy and expect the world to hand you what you want in life” group.
Make a plan…then go get it.
Just to add a level of reality to this 
The LDS Church does NOT encourage members to marry young – when compared to the stats presented earlier and everything I have read on the subject of marital success and divorce.
The general counsel is for all males to serve missions, which means they will be marrying no earlier than at the age of 20. The mission age for females was lowered to 19, and the message was pretty clear that the Church supports them serving missions – although, obviously, that is not stressed to the same degree. That means the Church is fully supportive of women marrying no younger than 21. The Church also officially says that all members should get as much education as possible, and the average education level of active members is higher than any other Christian denomination and other religious groups, except Judaism and atheism.
The stats say that 20 is the general differentiating age where the largest decrease in divorce occurs – and that the next point is old enough to impose serious impact on marriagability among the female church memberships. So, as a general rule, the focus on marriage between 21 – 27 years old is as sound advice as is possible for this particular population – and using missions to delay marriage, especially in rural areas and among the lower socio-economic groups where the tendency to marry earlier is the highest, is smart.
In this case, the disconnect is between previous practices and cultural norms and current advice. It takes time to change those sort of norms, but the leadership is saying and doing things that appear to be trying to do just that.
I’m late to this discussion, but I have to add my two cents. As a teenager, my entire identity was as an American. We lived in a third world country, but I went to an American or international school, we spoke English at the house and I hung out with a lot of other ex-pat kids. I was sure I was an American kid living in a foreign country.
After 3 1/2 years, at the age of 17, we moved back to the states. I was stunned to recognize that the American culture had moved on without me. I wasn’t the American kid I thought I was. I wasn’t a foreign national either. I was a mix, and I had no frame of reference within the society into which I had just been dropped. I didn’t know the popular culture. I felt completely lost.
I see My Plan is an excellent idea. Involving parents and and local leaders might prevent a suicide or two. As a first effort, it isnt going to be perfect. It will need lots of work and adjustments to get it mostly right for most people. It will never be a great fit for everyone as nothing ever is.
In my own life, I made myself to do the typical things for a local 17 year old. Go to the local beach .. So I could discuss THAT beach instead of Copacabana. Go to the mall. See the latest movies that everyone was talking about. I treated my home town like a new culture and I worked hard to immerse myself into that culture. It would’ve been an easy time to lose track of church during that process. Im pleased to see the church’s development of My Plan as an attempt to keep the Church in the cultural immersion process.
My Plan won’t work for many people, but if it helps 30% of RM’s transition back faster and in a healthier fashion, it will be a huge success .. Especially for those RMs who are blindsided by the transition back into civilian life.
Old-Timer wrote:Just to add a level of reality to this
The LDS Church does NOT encourage members to marry young – when compared to the stats presented earlier and everything I have read on the subject of marital success and divorce.
The general counsel is for all males to serve missions, which means they will be marrying no earlier than at the age of 20. The mission age for females was lowered to 19, and the message was pretty clear that the Church supports them serving missions – although, obviously, that is not stressed to the same degree. That means the Church is fully supportive of women marrying no younger than 21. The Church also officially says that all members should get as much education as possible, and the average education level of active members is higher than any other Christian denomination and other religious groups, except Judaism and atheism.
The stats say that 20 is the general differentiating age where the largest decrease in divorce occurs – and that the next point is old enough to impose serious impact on marriagability among the female church memberships. So, as a general rule, the focus on marriage between 21 – 27 years old is as sound advice as is possible for this particular population – and using missions to delay marriage, especially in rural areas and among the lower socio-economic groups where the tendency to marry earlier is the highest, is smart.
In this case, the disconnect is between previous practices and cultural norms and current advice. It takes time to change those sort of norms, but the leadership is saying and doing things that appear to be trying to do just that.
To an extent I suppose it depends on what your definition of young is Ray. And I think young for a church member may be different than young for a non-member.
I agree, DJ – which is why I said for our particular population. Interestingly, the last data I saw put the average first marriage age for the United States overall at about 27 for men and 24 for women, with the LDS ages being 24 and 21. If that was the average prior to more young women serving missions, it should be slightly higher now. As a historical comparison (both in the past and in third-world countries now), those ages are HIGH – especially for women. Seriously, a 21 year old unmarried woman would have been and still will be considered nearly an old maid in lots of times and cultures.
Old-Timer wrote:Just to add a level of reality to this…
The LDS Church does NOT encourage members to marry young – when compared to the stats presented earlier and everything I have read on the subject of marital success and divorce.…The stats say that 20 is the general differentiating age where the largest decrease in divorce occurs – and that the next point is old enough to impose serious impact on marriagability among the female church memberships. So, as a general rule, the focus on marriage between 21 – 27 years old is as sound advice as is possible for this particular population… In this case, the disconnect is between previous practices and cultural norms and current advice.It takes time to change those sort of norms, but the leadership is saying and doing things that appear to be trying to do just that. I don’t know about that, I still think it there is more to it than this. For example, look at the following exerpt from the the talk, “Be Not Afraid, Only Believe” by Jeffrey R. Holland to CES teachers.
Jeffrey R. Holland wrote:Brethren and sisters, I think we have to start earlier to teach our students the place of marriage and family in the great plan of happiness. Waiting until they are of marriageable age puts us way behind the curve. And I don’t have to tell you that social trends, declining moral standards, and the “vain imagination” of popular entertainment will regularly be in opposition to that teaching.
For example,
it is alarming to us that in the last 50 years the natural median age for men to marry has risen from age 22 to age 28! That is the world’s figure, not the Church’s, but we eventually follow the world in some way in much of its social trending.Add to this such diverse influences on the young as the increased availability of birth control, the morally destructive rise of pornography, an increased disaffiliation with institutional religion, the pervasive quest for material goods generally, the rise of postmodern thought with its skepticism and subjectivity and you see the context for anxiety and fear that a rising generation can feel. With these kinds of winds blowing in their lives, they can be damaged almost before mature, married life has begun. Furthermore,
so many young people I talk to fear that if they do marry they will be just another divorce statistic; they will be another individual who dove foolishly into marriage only to find there was no water in that pool. Couple that leeriness about the success of marriage with the tawdry, foul, often devilish mocking of chastity and fidelity and family life so regularly portrayed in movies and on television and you see the problem…We have our work cut out for us to preserve and perpetuate both the holiness and the happiness of marriage. Why would it be so alarming to them that the median marriage age for men has risen to 28? Why is that such a problem to begin with instead of a sign of progress? Personally I don’t believe this is generally a problem for individual people at all but it is a problem for the Church precisely because most people are typically not going to remain completely celibate year-after-year but strict obedience to the Law of Chastity is expected to get married in the temple and the Church basically depends on temple marriage to some extent to retain members because those that aren’t married to another active member in the temple are more likely to fall away from the Church permanently. I agree that they have their work cut out for them to try to uphold these traditions at all costs (assuming that’s the plan) and to me it looks almost like the Amish in that if people experience the outside world for very long to the point that they are not afraid of it then there’s a good chance they will never go back.
Of course, the advice still is to marry, on average, earlier than the United States national average – but that wasn’t the point of my comment. It is undeniable that the age at which the encouragement is focused is higher than historical ages (both outside AND inside the Church) and modern times in developing countries, and that the age is after 20, at the earliest – which is when the divorce rate drops significantly. It is easy to say the LDS Church encourages members to marry “young” – but that is incredibly selective and simplistic. In many countries, the encouragement is exactly the opposite – to marry later than the societal norm. That is extremely important to understand and credit, particularly since the Church is not just a US or first-world organization.
Even without that factor, 21-24 can only be considered young in modern, first-world countries – and only in the more affluent sub-groups in those countries (for whom delaying marriage is a financial advantage and college education is the expected norm, not the exception). Everywhere else, the LDS Church’s advice is in opposition to the natural pressures to marry at an age that truly is young.
In no way do I approve of teenage marriage now (even though I know couples who married in their teens and have happy, successful marriages and productive lives), but I also know people in the past would roll their eyes and laugh us to scorn for thinking 21-24 is “young”. We infantalize our children in many ways, and classifying young adults as too young to marry is one of them.
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